Hello.

I am haunted by my dead.

As it is, I am on the other side now of the two years of hellish recovery from the five-year long fever dream that was officially known as a “marriage”. But these past two years have also seen me become aware of how for nearly 60 years I’ve been sandbagged by ancestral hauntings.

Read more

Greetings,

In conversation with someone today, the topic of this region of Kentucky’s slavery history came up. I countered with a radical response.

I said, No on…

Read more

Hello.

I kept meaning to come back, but I had nothing of value to say. I also had been through a fiery forge after all the things that befell me last…

Read more

Read more

Greetings,

I heard a story today about an Inuit man who asked his community to arrange for him a ceremonial potlatch, a traditional gathering and feast. H…

Read more

Greetings, 

If you currently find yourself in debt for whatever reason, you know it is hard to get out of it. 

About a decade ago, after having been one of millions…

Read more

vol. 5 issue 13

Greetings,

I arrived near midnight, on a connecting flight from Minneapolis. I’d never been to Mon…

Read more

Greetings,

Over a week ago, an epiphany occurred to me. It was on the way back from the grocery where I had gone to request some stray empty boxes t…

Read more

Greetings,

This weekend I attended a musical “roots” festival. It wasn’t the bluegrass band I’d gone to see that held my attention, however, but the number of peopl…

Read more

Greetings,

There has been a steady stream of new subscribers lately.

Thank you and welcome!

My aim is to provoke you, while also making you laugh, because as Oscar Wilde observed, if you’re going to tell people the truth, you’d better be funny or else they will kill you.

And I do plan to lay a truth on you. Actually, three of them.

The first is that if you live in fear of something, chances are high you’re being controlled by someone whose agenda is for you to never not be afraid of that thing.

It’s a truth I keep rediscovering on what I am now calling my Temporary Homelessness Tour 2023 which began late last year inside the Beltway where I lived up until my recent divorce.

Currently, I am in America’s Dairyland, also known as Wisconsin for those of you who haven’t had occasion to see the stream of license plates bolted to the Buicks driven by Boomers high tailing it South on I-75 for Tennessee, the state where I have, to date anyway, spent the longest leg of this journey. Also the place where land is still cheap and taxes are for suckers, thus the exodus.

As for Wisconsin, the Boomers’ might be thinning out, but the Gen Xers like myself are everywhere. I have noted my peers and I have a lot more in common as Americans than we do differences, even if at first we seem less similar than we are.

Take my temporary neighbor, for example. Over the chain link fence, I told him I used to be a reporter in Washington. He gave me a variation of the typical response I get from most folks who don’t live somewhere within the New York-Philly-Washingtonlopolis corridor where even just a sniff of potential insider knowledge is like crack cocaine.

All such outsider responses can be boiled down to, “That must have sucked.”

My temporary neighbor, a white middle-aged American who, like me, came of age when microwaves were still a novelty, explained to me why he, “no offense” (none taken), doesn’t pay attention to the news any more.

The media, he said, just depresses him and makes him feel anxious, unhappy. He was lucky, he said, that his recent recovery from an illness coincided with the covid lockdowns, giving him the perfect excuse to isolate and not have to take in all that negativity. He didn’t want to hear about all the ways he was “supposed” to care.

“Now, I am perfectly happy being an introvert.”

Lucky!?

Read more

Greetings,

I was raised to be praised.

I was supposed to be special because of my looks (white, blonde, tall) which, according to the narrative I was steeped in, would confer upon me the right to a certain social standing.

As a teen, I was even told I would make a good “auxiliary wife”, a Junior League kind of Wunderkind with place cards and thank you notes. It sounded important at the time, but as the actual unfoldment of my life has proved, it was hell.

It was also wildly off the mark of how my heart actually beats and my mind operates, but since I had internalized the idea that until I achieved this weird accessory status, I would rank as a disappointment, liable to the threat of being unlovable and undesirable.

And nothing is more frightening to a human than being cut off from love and acceptance. Sure, studies have proven this, but screw the data. Look at your own life experience and tell me if you think I am full of shit. You can’t because I’m not.

That fear is why the fucked-up notion of specialness planted in my psyche left me highly susceptible to the love bombing I was shelled with about 7 years ago now (astrologers, take note! The Saturn cycle is real).

It was so intoxicating, a relief from the struggle to be loveable!

All the pretty promises felt warm and safe and fooled me into relaxing even further into this ersatz version of who I was supposed to become and what my purpose in life was supposed to be. Of course, I surrendered my senses to it, including my common sense.

I also surrendered my power and agency.

My shock and anger when I came back to my senses and realized it was all a lie was like an acid bath, as I’ve already noted. It was so dramatic, it precipitated my current state of homelessness. Which is ironic, because protection against the abject alienation from necessary resources was what I had thought I’d finally “achieved”.

But, this current state of free-floatingness is among the best things to have ever happened to me. It has shown me that the true wealth in my life is comprised of the things I have done and the relationships I have created that are borne of my authenticity, not of the transactional ways and means specialness requires of us in our thoughts and actions.

Read more

Greetings,

If you read about my D List year, it won’t come as a surprise when I tell you I am now homeless. That’s not an admission meant to shock.

And if …

Read more

Greetings,

You might have read my post about suicide as a social justice, not public health, issue last week.

Soon after it was up, a good friend c…

Read more

Greetings,

Please forgive the interruption to your Sunday, a day I personally love to leave open so that I can give my whirring brain a break, but …

Read more

Read more

Greetings,

The word “colonized” is so explosive anymore. But, it’s happened to virtually all of us, whether or not we recognize it, no matter our race,…

Read more

Greetings,

The latest fascist cosplay by Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis amuses me. Of course his militant movement to stamp out nonconforming sexua…

Read more

“The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy.”

~Republican Arkansas Governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Greetings,

I can’t thank Governor Sanders enough for prompting me to move ahead with something I have been fretting over wanting to do for a while now.

Namely, to take Marjorie Taylor Greene (R.-GA), seriously.

Generally, I pay no attention to Rep. Greene, but in my more generous moments, I feel sorrow for the likes of a woman who seems, to me anyway, overtaken by the ghouls of a rage so profound, composure is beyond her (I also believe she has a low IQ; however, plenty of sane people do, too).

Thanks to Gov. Sanders, who in her response to President Biden’s State of the Union address, characterized the current choices of the American body politic as between crazy and normal, I now feel some cover as I consider that Rep. Greene’s confabulous utterings might offer insight into a greater truth she cannot articulate, but which causes her to feel existential pressure.

Just watching Rep. Greene yell and hoot, I too have been pondering this dichotomy of normal and crazy, wondering whether there is a place in between; somewhere peace is deeper and truth more true because it is full and round, not binary.

Now I realize there is. It’s called science fiction.

Let’s equate science with “normal” and  fiction with “crazy”. With these as our parameters, we can now ask questions that otherwise, at least where public policy is concerned, we’d never dare ask. Well, I might, but perhaps with less temerity.

For example: What if there really are, as Rep. Greene has suggested, Jewish space lasers? What if, as her fellow Q-Anon insurrectionists claim, there really are star seeds among us?

What if, as I have mused previously, her preferred instrument of message dissemination, Fox News, is actually an ethereal, infected blood stream of hatred that has raised a Zombie nation from the crypt, providing the undead millions with the sustenance it needs, dripping with hits of heightened emotion, fueled by accusations of behavior in others that actually form the set point for behavioral standards among their own vampiric figureheads?

Now, thanks to Gov. Sanders, I can say with impugnity: Let’s go there!

Why am I so eager? Because I am fixated on this question, and have been for a while:

Why do we as a species seek to annihilate ourselves?

I’m not talking about sex, death, and cannibalism, where at least the species is procreative. I mean, Why are we a species that organizes itself so that the entire species will cease to exist? It is normalized craziness.

Beginning with the Permian Period, we’ve had millions of species die off on this planet – millions! – but when has a species sought to force Nature’s hand the way humans now do?

I will share with you my own mental perambulations on this:

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

I have begun to believe that something is actually wrong with us, something that wasn’t supposed to be wrong with us as a species. Whatever it is, I suspect it’s to do with that dividing line worrying Gov. Sanders. All that linearity. Bad.

Why are we so sure that it’s human nature to want to engage in “dog eat dog” maneuvers, to sort and select so that only some people have adequate access to resources in order to live, and so you’d better fight to be closer to the top, or risk loss of access to those resources, or worse, at risk of death? I don’t buy it.

Does that make me an anti-Darwinist Creationist? Uh, no. An atheist? Nope.

It just means I think we accept Zombie lullabyes and convenience too easily and our laziness is catching up to us and our planet.

Science leans on Darwin for its adherence to the eat-or-be-eaten paradigm. Only, don’t forget — Darwin’s Capitalist British backers had a lot riding on his expeditions into territories they wished to exploit. It is possible, therefore, that there might have been a few details left out of his theories.

Even if it wasn’t done on purpose, a recent scientific theory suggests that because Darwin didn’t perceive the fact of horizontal gene transfer, a phenomenon that is now undercutting the notion that evolution is merely linear, Darwin did, in fact, get things a tad wrong.

Which means that what has been used to justify the greed of Capitalism, is now up for debate. If only our collective news media and academia would focus on this discovery, public debate over the policies of resource distribution might strike a different note (don’t hold your breath).

Meanwhile, the Church, through story, explains our self-destructiveness as a presumptive arrogance (well, women’s such arrogance) to want to know things we shouldn’t ask about. But, like with Darwinism, any materials that contravened the preferred paradigm of linearity that focuses all attention on the man in the sky, have been dropped from the Bible (especially referring to reincarnation and how to develop the powers of higher mind) because such materials don’t serve the hierarchy of the Church. So, no matter how much I admire Pope Francis (and I do), I hold as suspect these old chaps’ claim that the whole truth is actually the whole truth.

Anyway, regardless of the who and how of keeping this paradigm of either/or firmly in place, I want to know why we’ve collectively agreed that it’s okay to defend it when it clearly is killing us.

Whenever I think about why we humans are doing things that will ultimately result in our utter destruction as an earthbound species — things like creating hierarchies that arbitrarily mediate access to resources, overpopulating the planet, burning down our rain forests, using up and polluting all our water, industrializing animal husbandry, scarring the earth for minerals and oil, warring for ego and sport, demanding there is no life beyond this one while also demanding that there is — it makes no sense.

Why would we set up the game so that in the end, we all die?

And why aren’t policy people interrogating our world’s problems from this perspective? Why do they accept as de facto that humans are fundamentally idiots? (Not ignorant, which can be remedied, but thick, which cannot be.)

What if we humans are being deliberately distracted from our magnificence?

Yeah. What if the hierarchical paradigm, perpetuated on earth by empires, was “installed” in us by extra-terrestials, so that we would be more easily subjugated into slavery? What if the pre-empire way of life here on Earth, the one that did not vaunt empiricism to divide What Is into natural and the so-called “supernatural”, is actually compatible with progress, and that we were intended to be superior beings who aced living in the totality of existence?

What if propaganda — whether promulgated by religions, brand name manufacturers, corporate media, or political parties — was designed by some other species to separate us from our soul and spirit, which generates our bodies as holographs of the more real and eternal universe from whence we arise and return, so that we would always be looking for the authority outside of ourselves, predisposing us to being controlled and told what to do?

That is, what if functioning democracies on Earth pose an existential threat to invaders of the autocratic kind?

This means, of course, that I am suggesting there is the possibility that News Corp. owner and chairman, Rupert Murdoch, who with the help of the suspiciously inhuman Roger Ailes, built Fox News from the ground up, is himself an extra-terrestrial, or is in league with some.

Murdoch’s posse of One Percenters? Why else would they tilt policy toward their unfettered engagement in practices that, if carried to their natural conclusion, would mean they would ultimately die, too?

What if it is somehow in these One Percenters’ best interest to distract us from our lemming-like march off the cliff of life of on Earth so that we don’t stop to examine why we’re assuring the world’s end?

Putting this fantastical, creepy “possibility” aside for a moment, let’s at least ask whether, regardless of how we got stuck in this paradigm of mindlessly marching to our demise, we can get out. I think we can.

The narrows through the canyon that divides science and fiction is myth.

My take is that myths allow there to be an operating principal that needn’t be proven, while also being so irrefutable, to act in accordance with it creates forward momentum.

Logical positivism, however, has infected academia with its insistence on empiricism as the end point, to the point of gangrene, so good luck bringing myth into public policymaking.

Oh, but that’s what I intend to do.

While I know what I believe, I don’t know what’s true.

I do not believe that the criteria for discovering new truths should hinge on empiricism alone, but it does not mean I accept truth is synonymous with crazy (by whose definition, anyway?). It means I see no reason made-up stuff can’t lead us to find workable policies and procedures based on our commonalities, which should, I imagine, include ensuring Earth’s survival.

Once upon a time, we had a common myth, for good or for ill, in this country, one primarily based on the Judeo Christian premise. Sadly for the adherents to the literal — and thus extreme — application of this ethos, they are now finding the Abrahamic traditions are no longer the ties that bind us together culturally. Despotic control and manipulation are their preferred antidote to their irrelevance.

It might be that we have reached an inflection point as a species where whatever good that flowed from the Axial Age, which is thought to have propelled us into modernity around the time of the Antiquities (but which like the theory of evolution is itself undergoing revision), we are now faced with the task of propelling humanity forward once again, by consciously creating a new psychology and operating theory of humanity. One which respects empiricism — that is, knowledge based on observation and experience — and applies it critically and with wonder and gratitude, but does not discount all other ways of knowing. Fiction has value, too.

Respect for metaphor can open us up to new ways of framing our human experience, namely, our relationships to the earth and to one another, and also to the cosmos. After all, diversity of thought leads to innovation.

In pursuit of a new paradigm, there is utility in science and fiction.

I also believe that it is worthwhile to revisit the discounted indigenous and so-called “pagan” belief systems that once were the predicate of entire civilizations, sophisticated ones that rendered complete health systems such as the Indian Ayurvedic and Persian Unani ones still in use today (albeit purloined and re-packaged by Western allopathy as “complimentary and alternative medicine”).

Making new myths can help collect us together again, move us forward, but also encircle us, helping us derive a richer sense of meaning from our lives and fill out the contours of an entirely new paradigm — an ensouled, Earth-protective one, not the current one of destructive either/or empiricism. Or, as Gov. Huckabee would have us believe, the paradigm of crazy or normal.

In that case, docu-mental will just have to take star seeds seriously. Watch this “space”…

Consistency counts

As one of the first publications to publish on the Substack platform, and a grant-awardee for the quality of its content, docu-mental has a rooted, consistent history and is now entering its fifth year.

The publishing schedule has shifted from a few times a week, to once a week, to now once a month, but I am always publishing: I won’t spaz out on you and disappear. At present, the monthly routine works for me, because life events demand it, but it is a temporary schedule.

Also, my time is split because I also co-host and produce a weekly podcast. The focus of Off the Charts: A Stellar Newscast dovetails nicely with this one. By using the wisdom of the cosmos, my co-host Elisabeth Grace, a former television network producer, and myself, a former Capitol Hill and policy reporter, flip the script on corporate media, offering our perspective and analyses on world events that corporate media can't — and won't — share with you because they are part of the paradigm that seeks to colonize our minds and distract us from ourselves.

The reason I publish anything at all is to contribute to the formation of sound public policy. I have no bullet points per se, even if I do have points of focus. Mostly, I want to ask good, well-wrought questions that have import, even if they are fantastical; they are no less serious.

My hope is that readers disperse these ideas into the ethers, where they might rain down, informing more conscious and considered thoughts and actions that support life here on Earth.

Peace,
Whitney

If you’re new to docu-mental, welcome! Here are some past entries that you might find interesting.

docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind

The docu-mental digest

vol. 4 issue Greetings, Welcome to the over 100 subscribers that have found their way here in the past several weeks, while I have been on hiatus, no less. I am so glad you’re here! docu-mental will soon enter its fifth year of award-winning, unfettered thinking out loud about what it means to be american…

Read more

3 years ago · 3 likes · 4 comments · Whitney McKnight (Fishburn)

docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind

'Defund the police' wrong action for right goal? Top cops share views on how to evolve policing

Listen now (62 min) | vol. 2 issue 51…

Listen now

5 years ago · Whitney McKnight (Fishburn)

docu-mental: mapping the american states of mind

Why Blacks are the soul of this nation

vol. 4 issue 24 Greetings, Three things. Number one: Jesus and me Initially, I was at a loss to explain why, despite my expressed invitation to Christian evangelicals earlier this summer to please tell me why you love Jesus, not many of you have offered commentary on what I post…

Read more

3 years ago · 4 likes · 4 comments · Whitney McKnight (Fishburn)

Greetings,

In an occupied nation, could psychedelics be what set us free?

The thought occurred to me recently as I was walking in the woods with the dog. …

Read more

Greetings,

Although where I live is urban, there is by happenstance, a small patch of fairly mature woodland behind and to the side of where my apartme…

Read more